Macy's heads into its August 26 earnings print with short sellers rebuilding positions at the fastest weekly pace in months, even as the stock slips back toward the low $20s.
The short interest story is the standout this week. Bears have added meaningfully — SI climbed 8.5% in a single week to 12% of the free float, the highest reading in the trailing 30-day window. In raw terms, roughly 32.3 million shares are now estimated short. That acceleration began sharply on August 10, when estimated short shares jumped from around 30.3 million to 32.3 million over three sessions and held there. The borrow market, however, tells a quieter story. Availability remains extraordinarily loose at over 1,100% — meaning there are more than eleven shares available to borrow for every one currently lent out, the deepest pool seen in the past year. Cost to borrow runs at just 0.48%, a level that hasn't materially changed despite the surge in positioning. Shorts are adding aggressively, but they're doing so in a frictionless market with no squeeze pressure visible anywhere in the lending data. Options reflect a mild defensive lean — the put/call ratio is 1.10, just above its 20-day average of 1.09, and well within normal range at less than one standard deviation above the mean. The overall positioning picture reads as deliberate bearish rebuilding rather than a panicked crowd.
The Street sits in an awkward middle ground. Morgan Stanley reinstated with an Overweight and a $30 target in early July — the most bullish call in the recent wave — but most other active analysts cluster around Neutral and Hold, with JPMorgan at $27 and TD Cowen at $25. The consensus mean target of roughly $22.80 sits marginally below the current price of $23.41, which is itself a signal: at this level, the average analyst isn't pricing in upside. The bull case rests on 20 consecutive quarters of comparable sales growth across Macy's nameplate portfolio, a 17% jump in credit card revenues, and steady traction at the 125 "reimagined" locations. Bears point to a 1.7% net sales decline, EBITDA margins projected to compress from 6.3% to roughly 5%, and tariff headwinds that cloud gross margin into the back half of the year. On valuation, the stock trades at roughly 10.4x trailing earnings and an EV/EBITDA of 5.9x — undemanding multiples, but the P/B has drifted lower over the past week, down about 6%.
The stock itself has given back 7.8% over the past five sessions to close at $23.41, unwinding most of a one-month gain of under 1%. Close peer Kohl's fell a more modest 0.5% on the week, while Dillard's dropped sharply — down 8.4% — suggesting sector-wide pressure with some idiosyncratic pain concentrated in the department-store names. SVV also fell 12.8% over the same period. Macy's isn't the only retailer under pressure, but the combination of its own share-price decline and the simultaneous short rebuild stands out against a mixed peer backdrop.
Prior earnings prints offer context without comfort. June's Q1 release produced a 6.3% single-day gain and held most of that through the following week. The Q4 print in May moved just 1.1% on the day but rallied 12.8% over the subsequent five sessions. Both suggest the market has been capable of rewarding beats, but the setup this time — shorts at a monthly high, analysts clustered near the current price, and a margin story under pressure — means the stakes around the August 26 number are higher than either of those prior prints implied.
What to watch into the print: whether the short rebuild holds or accelerates through next week, whether the $22–$23 analyst target cluster proves sticky as a floor, and whether margin guidance or any commentary on tariff exposure shifts the narrative more decisively than the comparable-sales line itself.
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